Friday, February 1, 2013

Testing Ads Becomes Better, Cheaper, and Faster

For both qualitative and quantitative research purposes,
testing ads has been an important staple in the diet of marketers for several
decades. Simply launching ads
and seeing how well they work (or don’t work) after the fact is an
undisciplined and risky approach.
Historically, that practice has resulted in countless failures in
communicating messages to the general public.
Instead, market researchers have been conducting specialized research
over the years to avoid the pitfalls of poor or inadvertent communications as
well as to sharpen them before they are launched.

Well into the 21st century, testing ads has become
part and parcel of thousands of organizations’ research agendas as they
develop, test, and launch new ads that break through the clutter of an otherwise
multi-sourced, multitudinous plethora of communications targeted to consumers in
order to attract and consummate their business relationships.

BlogNog has now brought to market the ultimate technology for
testing videos for the main purpose of informing decisions about whether, for
example, a TV commercial should be launched, revised, or killed before it is
aired.

Introducing VADS
(Video Analysis Decision System). This
platform enables the researcher to upload a video provided by the client
organization or one that can be found anywhere on YouTube. While the video itself can be of any length, research
respondents view the video and use ARROW keys to react to the visual stimulus
in terms of their relative favorability to what they are seeing millisecond-by-
millisecond.

In the past, this sort of study was conducted using expensive
equipment that included individual dials attached to a large electronic console
that would collect and aggregate the data.
The viewing was done in special focus group facilities that accommodated
auditorium seating. These studies were
always extremely expensive, limited to a few markets around the country, and
often times problematic when equipment was incorrectly set up or overly worn.

Subsequently, this technology was adapted online and has been
in existence for several years. However,
the user interface has been clunky and imprecise as respondents were forced to
use their mouse to move a slider found at the base of their screen. As a result, the measurements taken lacked
the calibration that matched what the respondent actually saw and did.

VADS represents a leap in technology. Simply, it is the most precise, easy to use
interface for study respondents who no longer have to keep one eye on the video
and another on the slider. Instead, they
hit the UP and DOWN arrow keys while keeping their concentration on the test
stimulus for its entire duration. As a
result, the researcher can zero in on the “Peaks” and “Valleys” of the line
graph that represents the output of such testing and can precisely inform the client
exactly what is good, bad, or otherwise about the ad before its launch.

Just like its name implies, VADS is the ultimate decision-making platform system for testing ads and other video stimuli. As part of BlogNog, it is provided at much lower costs than any other such platform in the industry, easy to set up and use, and takes all the guesswork out of advertising and communication testing and development.